


The Mess Inside

by uro_boros



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, References to Depression, Snow White might be a metaphor but Steve is too depressed to think that part through, Steve is sad and Bucky has a memory like sieve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-19 23:47:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14883578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uro_boros/pseuds/uro_boros
Summary: Sam asks, "What makes you happy?"It's a loaded question.--This is what happiness is to Steve: 1938 and Snow White, Bucky rubbing his two dimes together to make it happen.





	The Mess Inside

Sam asks, “What makes you happy?”

—

In 1938, happiness was seeing  _Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs_  for the first time on one of Bucky’s dimes, because winter had already laid waste to his lungs and work had dried up to a few signs he painted when he felt strong enough to stand the paint fumes. It was mostly work Steve got out of pity, and it paid badly for that, because no one in their neighborhood really expected him to make it past his newest illness. His entire life at that point, all nineteen years of it, had been about proving everyone wrong; each subsequent birthday felt like a victory and a kick in the gut, all rolled in one.

They saw _Snow White_ four times that year, because Steve wanted to, and Bucky knew he did without Steve having to say it. Each time felt like a revelation — each song and scene, the colors splendid and bright, even through the gray haze of Steve’s color blindness. He loved it. He talked to Bucky about it for hours after each showing, trudging their way home through the dirty winter slush of the city. He talked about the way the scenes stretched to the edges of their frames, all encompassing, the way the branches, gnarled and sinister, reached fingers out to catch Snow White as she ran through the forest. He talked enough that Bucky had to have had all of Steve’s thoughts memorized, but without fail, he listened like it was the first time he’d heard it.

Bucky was good like that. He was the best man Steve knew.

1938 was the year after his mother’s death and three months into it, it was the year that Steve agreed to move in with Bucky, in lieu of a birthday present he couldn’t afford. It was a year that was stretched tight; Bucky worked two jobs and did odd tasks for people in their tenement building, while Steve went to school when he was well, painted signs, and tried not to die. He had a stubborn streak a mile long, Bucky had always said, and that streak saw him through two bouts of pneumonia and the uncertain fluttering of his heart.

The apartment was drafty in winter and sweltering in summer. It was loud, too, with paper thin walls and too many people stuffed inside. The floors creaked, the pipes rattled, the water pressure was spotty. They paid $4.50 a week for it, to cram themselves inside one bedroom on the fourth floor, because rent went up fifty cents to a dollar the closer to street level, and the fourth floor was a compromise between Steve’s asthma and weak heart and their purse strings. But still — Steve loved that apartment, with all its flaws.

By then, he’d been living alone for two years in his mother’s apartment. Sarah Rogers had been tucked away — hacking, dying painfully, dying slowly — into a sanatorium that he visited once a week, on Sunday’s after Mass for a year. Their apartment had seemed to freeze in her absence; to Steve, it felt like a grave. It took a year for tuberculosis to make Sarah’s grave literal; Steve had hated it for that, for the indignity, much more than anything else.

For another year, he rode his landlord’s sympathy, and when that waned, the Barnes’ couch. Bucky only asked once about moving in together, right after the funeral, when Sarah’s body was fresh in the ground, but not fresh in Steve’s heart, not really.

And when the grief scabbed over, in 1938, after their third showing of  _Snow White_ , Steve agreed to move in with Bucky.

The apartment was nothing, but it was theirs in a way his mother’s hadn’t been in a long time. It smelt like garbage from the alley outside their one small window and like the Brylcreem Bucky kept on hand. It was where Bucky tacked up Steve’s art on the walls — “Gives this place a little cheer, huh, pal?” — and where Steve finally, finally, learned how to cook something somewhat decent on the occasion they had some spare money to buy meat.

1938 was the year Steve learned to breathe again. He owed that to Bucky, too.

—

The room’s quiet. This is Steve’s first thought.

The second, that it isn’t, really. In 1938, Brooklyn had seldom been quiet, but occasionally, _occasionally_  — a hush would settle over the city at night, a silence or a calm, and Steve would lean his head out their small window and Bucky would stir in the bed on the other side of the room, fishing for a cigarette. He tried not to smoke around Steve, but — occasionally. And Bucky would light it, a snap-hiss, the only noise for miles, and Steve would breathe. Just. Breathe. And listen to Bucky inhale, exhale, inhale. Both of them, synchronized, Steve’s lungs finding it easy for once to work right.

“It’s a real nice night,” Bucky would say. And Steve would lean his head out further, into the cool dark air, and he’d reply, “A real nice night,” in agreement.

The future doesn’t have that. Maybe it does; somewhere else, in the middle of the country, in the corn fields and empty plains, but not in New York. Not anymore. There’s a mechanical whirr to everything now, a hum in the background. Permanent white noise.

His third thought: There’s someone else in the room with him.

It’s Bucky. Or James. It changed daily, sometimes hourly, and Steve tried to keep up, he did, but it was hard; it was hard to squash down the ever-hopeful voice in his head, the one that wanted nothing more than to lay down and cry with relief because he wasn’t alone in this brave new world, because Bucky made it to the end of the line.

But like the city being quiet, Bucky isn’t Bucky — not really. Peering at him from the other side of the room, bangs in his eyes, right shoulder pressed hard against the wall, he’s a shadow. A dream; a surrealist expression; the ghost of Christmas past and future. Not present. Bucky didn’t seem to exist in the same space-time continuum as Steve. Their presents hadn’t lined up since 1944.

It’s so much harder to live than it has any right to be, Steve thinks. Not for the first time. Not for the last.

“James,” Steve calls. Always start with James, like a mantra. Bucky was on good days, but only after permission’s been given. It didn’t matter if Steve’s head associated James with Monty or with Father Murphy, the priest who used to sit by his bedside during the winters when his lungs would seize and the neighbors would start their dark whispers; it didn’t matter if he thought of James and thought of being seven and eight, respectively, with Winifred Barnes shouting both of their names down from the third floor, so that they ran together as one long one —  _JamesBuchananStevenGrant_. It didn’t matter. What Bucky needed did.

“Bucky.”

“Bucky,” he corrects himself. Sleep drags on him. He’s tired down into his bones.

He doesn’t think of the Valkyrie very much. Dreaming, and nightmares, don’t count as thinking. But when he does, Steve thinks of this: the ice, and how it seemed to take forever to die, and how by the end he thought that maybe warmth was something his imagination had made up — that hot summer days in Brooklyn with Bucky and his mother had never existed. That he’d been in the ice his entire life. Dante had said hell was a frozen lake of blood and guilt — Steve had believed it, in those final moments. It had seemed to be the only thing he could believe at all.

He’s too tired to not be pathetic. It’s easy to break apart in the dark. So, it’s alright that his voice comes out thin and reedy when he croaks, “Are you really here?”

And it’s also alright to ask, because sometimes Bucky isn’t, because even when it’s Bucky’s body, it’s not always Bucky. It’s okay to ask, even if Steve stopped asking for things years ago, when he realized his body was always going to be frail and was always going to hurt and he was never going to make it to see thirty.

(He had asked, still, silently to God on his knees and his crooked-spine bowed in prayer, that he might; that he might just be allowed to stay a little longer, even in as broken of a body as his, because Steve in 1938 had been a little in love with his best friend and also a little in love with living)

There’s nothing, no sound, no acknowledgement, from across the room. It is pathetic, too, how his eyes burn, but it’s also alright — it’s not the first time that he’s called for Bucky in the dark and been met with nothing.

Cold metal presses along the angle of his cheeks; the sensation pops into focus with almost a lurid jerk of his consciousness because his skin is flushed hot from crying and shame, and Bucky’s hand is cold as ice. On the helicarriers, that hand had slammed his head repeatedly, until the fat of his face burst and split along the lines of his bones.

He can’t remember the last time he was touched gently. He can’t remember the last time he was touched at all.

“Steve,” says Bucky in a hoarse whisper, “Stevie. I’m here. I don’t know how much longer,” and Bucky pets at Steve’s face a little more hurriedly at that thought, strokes his hand from Steve’s cheeks to his forehead, sweeps down to Steve’s neck; rushed, like he’s distressed. “I never know how much longer I’m gonna be here, but I’m here, I’m here.” The bed rocks under his weight as he climbs into it.

He isn’t dressed for sleeping. He’s dressed for a fight that’s not coming, military surplus boots and clothes because the remains of SHIELD had took away his tac gear. But he gathers Steve close, regardless, so that they lay together like nestled parenthesis. It is hot, suffocating even, between supersoldier-boosted body heat and the heavy blankets that Bucky tucks around them, but Steve shivers hard like he’s freezing.

“Sweat the fever out,” croons Bucky into his ear — into what used to be his good ear. “You remember? You gotta sweat the fever out.” He presses his mouth, hot like a brand, into the fragile thin skin under Steve’s ear.

“I don’t know how,” Steve admits, desperate, “I don’t know how to anymore, Bucky, I’ve forgotten everything, I’ve forgotten how, and no one can tell me or show me, no one tries to,” and he croaks, chokes, thinks of Peggy in her hospice bed, crying, “It’s been so long, Buck, it’s been so long since I’ve done it.”

“I know,” says Bucky, pulling him closer, “but you gotta remember how to, doll. I’d do it for you if I could, but my memory isn’t what it used to be. So you have to do it for the both of us, alright? Just for a little bit. Just for a little bit longer.”

“You’ll come back?” It’s hard to ask. His entire being aches to ask.

“I’m like a bad penny,” Bucky promises. “I always turn up.”

—

Sam thinks it’s sacrilegious that he hasn’t seen a Disney movie since  _Bamb_ i in ’42. That isn’t true, precisely — Steve had gone and seen  _Victory Through Air Power_  in 1943, but people forgot about that one. “They’re not even on your list?” he asks, gaping at Steve.

Steve laughs. The day is warm, and the outside patio of the coffee shop is shaded and charming, with green ferns and cheerful yellow umbrellas. “I can’t put everything I’ve missed on the list,” he says. “It’d get too long.”

“We’re sitting down and watching the _Fox and the Hound_ today so I can see you cry,” Sam tells him.

 _The Fox and the Hound_ is very good, but it doesn’t make Steve cry. Sam is sorely disappointed by that until he realizes he has nearly 60 years of a film library for them to go through. Steve likes most of them, though he tells Sam nothing really compares to Snow White, which had been wondrous, mostly, for being the first.

“Still can’t believe _Fox and the Hound_ didn’t get to you,” Sam says as he leaves. He had, unlike Steve, teared up when Tod and Copper went their own ways.

Steve smiles at him, fond, a diffuse warmth lingering along his limbs; “I guess I’m just happy today,” he says, “It was a good day.” Sam gives him a smile back at that — a real one, white teeth, dimples.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Sam tells him sincerely before he goes.

The sun through the shutters of Steve’s apartment windows is the color of raw sienna — golden, pooling richly in warm puddles. It catches on something on the window sill and glints. A copper penny, shining. Steve had caught sight of it first thing in the morning and had left it where it sat; where Bucky had left it to be found.

He sits back down on the couch, feeling warm and languid and happy, opens the queue of movies still on his television, and sings along with Snow White —  _I’m wishing._


End file.
